Great Transition Initiative

Toward a New Praxis

The Great Transition Initiative is an online forum of ideas and an international network for the critical exploration of concepts, strategies, and visions for a transition to a future of enriched lives, human solidarity, and a resilient biosphere. By enhancing scholarly discourse and public awareness of possibilities immanent in these troubled times, and by fostering a broad network of thinkers and doers, it aims to contribute to a new praxis for global transformation.

One Aim, Many Voices

Correspondingly, GTI maintains a cosmopolitan outlook that is attuned to critical questions of scale and the ways nested systems operate across global, regional, and local levels. It gives voice to diverse contributors motivated by both ethical and pragmatic concerns about the need for revised ways of thinking, learning, acting, and being. It aims to deepen understanding of values and cultural dimensions of global change, along with social, economic, political, and scientific aspects of a Great Transition.

Background

GTI’s roots extend back a quarter century to the early discourse on the meaning and implications of sustainable development. Advocates of a transformational strategy sought deeper cultural shifts, a new sustainability paradigm to drive and guide development. In 1995, Tellus convened the Global Scenario Group to illuminate the requirements for a transition to sustainability. It summarized its insights in the valedictory 2002 essay Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead. The time had come to engage a far larger group, and GTI was launched in 2003, then reimagined and relaunched in 2014 to feature an on-line journal. The corresponding Great Transition Network continues to expand as a forum for engaged thinkers and thinking activists to come together to advance a vision and praxis for another world.